A Geography Lecturer’s reflective diary exercise

Early in 2011 I set the 1st years a between-tutorials task of keeping some kind of reflective diary or blog about their Geography studies every day until their next tutorial in two weeks time. It sounded like a fun and useful exercise, so I thought I’d join in… partly to show them how you might do it (an example, not a model) and partly because, well, it’s a fun and useful exercise! I asked the students to treat it as an exploration and an adventure. Looking back on it a year later I found it interesting, so I thought I’d post it here, just for the record, in case anybody wondered what kinds of things went through a Geography lecturer’s mind at work, day to day. Here are my (slightly cut down) entries.

Day 1

Just had one formal class today: a 1st-yr tutorial… the one where I video them giving talks for the first time. I’m keeping up the “new style” tutorials – pretty relaxed, and the students seem happy with them. This is a good group: they all did their bit, even though I know it was painful for some of them. I’d have hated it if I was still them. What am I talking about: I am still them – they just don’t recognise me. Getting them to do the reflective diary is new, but it fills a very clear need at this stage. My dog, Gus, means well and when you set him a task (like SIT and STAY) he goes to it with enthusiasm… for about 10 seconds then his mind wanders. He needs to learn some staying power. Doing something every day without fail for a fortnight might turn out to be a challenge for the students, but it’s an important thing for them to get used to. I’m really curious to see whether they take it seriously and see the point of it. I deliberately didn’t give it a big build up. I just offered it and we’ll see whether they see what a great gift it actually is. I can guess a couple that won’t bother, and a couple might miss days and try to cover up. May be I’ll turn out to skip a day! That’s another reason it’s good for the lecturer sometimes to do the work that he sets the students: how can I fairly judge them if I haven’t actually had a go myself? Having said that, most of my life seems to be about writing reflective diaries. In other news: Routledge are asking whether we want to do an update to our bestselling -How to do your dissertations- book (hmmm, may be), the U.S, National Science Foundation want me to referee a grant proposal (sorry guys, too busy just now), Earth Science Reviews want me to referee a paper about permafrost (oh, OK), and a publisher from Romania that I’ve never heard of wants me to write something in a new Geomorphology book they’re producing (er… I’ve never heard of you!). Spent a lot of time over the last couple of days preparing Friday’s Inspirational Landscapes lecture, met with RIW to discuss next week’s practicals… uh oh, this is becoming a list of what I did, not a reflective diary. Poor example for students. Reflection on today: students did good work, and I should give some thought as to whether it was anything I did in course design or strategy that helped them to do so. Perhaps I should ask them?

Day 2

Did “video their talks” tutorial for the second group today, and was pleased again that all the students who turned up had clearly put in some work and made a good effort. Some of them were clearly nervous and I was impressed with their bravery. It’s another example of the kind of problem that anonymous marking throws up: different students deserve credit for different aspects of each task. Obviously these talks aren’t anonymous, of course, so the problem doesn’t arise here, but I do feel with other work that is anonymously marked that we are prevented from giving students all the credit they deserve.

This afternoon’s Inspirational Landscapes lecture was one that I always think should be great, but somehow always disappoints in one way or another. I think some of the students “got” what I was on about, and there were some good in-discussion contributions, but there was a group who didn’t seem to be quite on the same page and didn’t seem to want to explore the ideas I was throwing up for them. They really seemed to struggle with the task of seeing familiar things from a new angle, and reacted to the challenge by becoming dismissive, almost as though they were thinking “Oh, I haven’t thought in that way before, it must be rubbish”. I sometimes wonder whether there should be an entry test for this module, based on open mindedness and curiosity. How would you quantify and test that?

Day 3

At a superficial first thought I might say I haven’t done much academic work today. Sure, I’ve answered a few student queries by e-mail, but so far that’s about it. Superficial first thoughts can be misleading, though.

It’s important to be able to work in the background while doing other things. If you have a problem or a topic sitting just behind your front-of-mind thoughts, something you’ve put back there to be dealt with later, then it tends to pop up quietly through the day whenever you see anything that’s relevant to it, and your ideas can move forward on it without having to actually set aside time to “work” on it. So today I have all those “big projects” just simmering quietly where I can keep half an eye on them and stir them occasionally. I wonder whether students would do much better if they could master that skill. A lot of them seem to think that you are either “working” or “not working” and don’t seem to see that you can work effortlessly in the back of your mind while doing whatever else you want to do. You can actually do a lot of good work while you sleep. That’s why students who don’t sleep enough do badly. I find that if I do that, then when I eventually do sit down to finish off a particular job (like the lecture that I’m deliberately not working on today), it will suddenly seem very simple, because my mind worked it all out while I didn’t think I was looking. So, I may not seem to working today, but the back of my mind is working while I’m not looking!

I was saying to the 3rd-year Inspirational Landscape students yesterday that Geography is a curse: once you have seen how it works you can’t look at anything without “Geography” waving back at you. When you start to notice the geography in everything then you can count almost anything as work!

It’s also nice to have a job (or to be studying for a degree) where work feels like play, so you don’t really notice the work. For example, writing this entry is technically part of my job… it’s a teaching exercise tied to the tutorial. On the other hand, it’s fun and it’s interesting. However, I have a dog to walk and a horse to feed…

Day 4

I started the previous entry saying that it was “today’s entry”. In a reflective diary like this it’s sometimes good to set aside one point in each day to think back over what you’ve done, but it’s sometimes good to keep a running report as the day goes along. I keep notebooks all over the place and am rarely without either a pen and paper or at least some gadget where I can record a thought before it slips away.

When I set this task for students I said they could do it as haiku if they wanted. I’ve been thinking a lot recently about using haiku in teaching. Haiku are great for encouraging concise and precise writing, and they are also good for training students to look carefully and notice things. I spoke to the 3rd-yrs on Friday about how the best way to make yourself really look closely at something was to give yourself the task of representing it or recreating it in some way. For example, by making a model, doing a drawing… or writing a poem. Look really hard and write what you see. The first attempt will be trivial, so look deeper… repeat until you are seeing things you never noticed before. I really like the idea of Geographical Haiku. Yes, of course all genuine Haiku are geographical in that they refer to an aspect of the natural environment, but I’d really like to develop haiku that refer to a specific location and could be geotagged on google earth. I could set students an exercise to write about their home area, or a place they visited, and plot the poems up onto a big map. May be such a thing already exists in google earth… may be one of my excellent students will read this, seek it out and let me know. Meanwhile I put a few up on twitter now and again.

What do you see when you look out of the window? I see 17 syllables.

I got an e-mail asking me whether I’d be willing to join in a trial of audiotaping my lectures… been there, done that. In fact I recorded GEG30014 on Friday. My lectures don’t seem to do well for being taped… perhaps that says something about my lectures, and I need to think what that is. I’ll pop that in the back of my mind and let it simmer…

Day 5

I started today with a mountain of tasks and now here I am, half way through it (or up it)! And the evening is yet young, hey ho. Unfortunately one of today’s tasks was telling a student that I was disappointed in him. I wonder whether students believe me when I say I really want them to do well or that I am disappointed when they let themselves (and me) down. Do they understand how much lecturers can really want students to make the most of the opportunity that they have here? I wrote a reference for a former student today and was able to say how she had really lived up to the faith we’d put in her: she worked hard, did well, and put her studies to good use. You remember students like that. I’m still in touch with students from when I first started teaching in 1987, and I still remember their strengths (and weaknesses) as students, even though they have now grown well past those and are in their 40s.

Another thing I’ve been thinking about today is how students often ask for things that are actually bad for them. For example, students often say things like “can you tell me which pages I should read?” when the whole point of the exercise is for them to go through the experience of DECIDING which pages to read. Sure, I can tell you, but then you miss the whole point of being here. If you want an intellectually easy life and don’t want to do the work necessary to improve yourself, you might be better advised to consider an alternative path!

Somebody on Twitter last week asked “what makes a geographer?”. A student in their reflective blog this week said how they were increasingly seeing geography all around them. So, I’m thinking that what makes a geographer is seeing the geography around you, and not being able to stop thinking geography!

2nd-yr prac went quite well today… students seemed to be getting something out of it. Must catch one and squeeze feedback from them.

Day 6

One of the best things and the worst things about my job is the flexibility. It’s great that I could take today away from Keele to do some nice not-work stuff, but on the other hand the flexibility means that you never “finish” your day’s work just because the clock reaches a certain point, and if you keep your e-mail running you find yourself getting queries from students while you’re eating your tea. Hmmm. Banana sandwich, anyone? I make a lot of extra work for myself with some of the unusual exercises I set for students. I really enjoy keeping up with WebCT discussions, or with the reflective diaries of the students who are posting them daily online just now, but if you count it as work then it certainly adds in extra time when I’m not getting on with writing the talk I have to give to a group of visitors tomorrow! Time management is crucial, and becomes more important the more you have to do. Perhaps a good way to teach students time management, rather than “explaining” it to them, would be to quadruple their workload and give them two essays a week. That’s what we got when I was a student. When I was a lad… …and look how I turned out: yet again writing a talk the night before it’s due to be presented. D’oh! It’s actually been a longrunning discussion since I started teaching: throw them in at the deep end or let them in gradually. Swinging pendulums, and I’m erring back towards the short sharp sit up and grow up approach. I need some hyphens in there, but I need my banana sandwich even more.

Day 7

One of my jobs today was to give a 1-hour “looking at landscape” session to a visiting group of asylum seekers as part of Keele’s internationalisation program. There were many interesting comparisons between “regular” students and this group, one of which was how polite the visitors were today, and how nicely they all said hello as they arrived and said thank you and good bye as they left. They clearly weren’t taking the session for granted as so many “regular” students seem to. I wonder if students realise how much work goes into some of the sessions we give, that they roll into half asleep, chatter through without making the effort to join in with discussion time, and stroll out of, eyes to the floor, without a word of recognition or appreciation. Not that I’m moaning or anything. I’m just saying. It was nice to have a really polite and interested group of “students” who really seemed to be enjoying what we were doing. Why don’t regular students come across that way?

Day 8

My reflections on today’s time at Keele focus largely on two of my colleagues, so on this occasion I think I’d better not do a public diary! I will wonder publicly, though, what students imagine the Dept is like ‘behind the scenes’…

Day 9

This is the first time I’ve run this particular exercise with students, and while I certainly think it has potential and could be really useful to them it also needs a few tweaks. For example, it’s nice giving students total freedom to do it however they like (web, paper, VLE, etc) but now of course some are being highly visible and public while others are unseen and untrackable. It would be nice to have some degree of common sharing at this stage, so perhaps I should have at least defined a shared venue for postings, such as the VLE. Also, using the VLE would reduce the risk of students making public comments about my colleagues, which would be inappropriate I guess. The posts I’ve seen so far from the “public” students have been great, although they don’t all seem to have understood what is meant by “reflective”. Something to reflect on together in the next tutorial, perhaps.

Day 10

I’ve been very pleased to get diary updates from lots of students today, and have enjoyed seeing their entries. It really gives me (and I hope them, too) an insight into how they are approaching the course. Some seem to be underestimating how much work they need to do to keep up with a degree course, while others are engaging really well. As always it’s a mixed bag, and part of my job is work with each student according to their needs. I’ve also been getting some input from 3rd-years on a different discussion, and it’s interesting to think how students change their views (or not) as they go through the course. Some students really grow and open up their attitudes as they work through the programme. Some don’t, of course, which I think is a real shame. What, after all, is the point of University? I think I put a reasonable weight on that side of the “teaching” but it’s hard to get the right balance. I suspect I focus more on the “big picture” than most of my colleagues do, but that might be because of my particular perspective on Geography, teaching and University. I remember I used to be very pleased sometimes when I remembered all my qualifications and prizes because it reassured me that my approach and opinions must have some merit! That’s one reason it was also nice to get the NTF a few years ago. I suppose I should also take it as a reminder that saying “well done” to a student is as important as saying “change this”.

Day 11

Long day at the open day today. Amongst other things the open day is a good opportunity to speak to a different kind of audience: a bit younger (the applicants) and a lot older (their parents etc) than the usual student groups I mainly talk to. I ran a new “tutorial type” Inspirational Landscapes demo teaching session for them today, and was pleased that both the parents and even some of the applicants were brave enough to speak up in “discussion”. It made me wonder again what it is that happens to many students in that brief window while they are students, to make them so reluctant! Perhaps students should be made to take a 3-year gap between school and university, coming back when they are ready to get the most out of it. On some TV show last night one character complained about having to deal with a teenager: “teenagers are slow witted” she said. Of course my students are not at all slow witted, but certainly younger and older groups seem to get much more visible satisfaction out of my “classes”. It was great today when some bloke about my age came up after the Inspirational Landscapes demo lecture and said that after just half an hour of Geography he really looked at the world differently! We should bottle the stuff and sell it on t’internet.

Day 12

Reflective, perhaps, but less effective today than I hoped to be. Suffering from the typical student problem of distractions and poor focus I have done only part of one of the two big jobs that were on my plate for the day, but have spent a lot longer than I intended dealing with little things that kept cropping up. A student last week commented that lecturers find it easy to lecture, but in fact it’s probably useful for students to realise that we find things as hard as they do. We try to be a good example not by “being good at things” but by “being willing to work at things and try hard” even if they are difficult. I too get distracted by Twitter and Facebook and the cats and dogs and having to wash the car and doing family things and helping the lady next door when she runs out of milk. I, too, want to stop work so I can watch TV instead. We’re not immune. So that means that we do indeed, to some extent (even though some of us are so ancient) have at least some idea of what it’s like being a student. So our advice is informed by an understanding of at least some of your reality. On the other hand, some student realities continue to surprise me. Student: “Are all clouds formed the same way? I don’t know how to find out… help me!” Me: “Yes they are: try looking in a meteorology book.” Student: “A meteorology book? I hadn’t thought of that!!” Me: “…sigh…”.

Day 13

Today I’ve been thinking again about what a varied job I have and about how thoroughly interleaved parts of my job are with parts of my non-work life. That could be seen as a good thing because obviously I’m being paid for doing what I’d do anyway, but also a bad thing because it’s hard to get away from work. For example, I bought an easel today for painting out of doors, which you’d think was pure hobby. But as I’m doing it I’m thinking about how I can use art as an example in Geography teaching, about how observation (data collection) can be enhanced by but is also limited by the established purpose of the experiment (sorry I mean painting): Geography and life are one! Today I’ve updated a lecture to deliver on Friday, reviewed a paper for the editors of the journal Earth Science Reviews, adjudicated five University Appeals cases in my role as Chair of the Appeals Committee, taken delivery of a new video camera for use in teaching, (I’m not going to list the easel here because that was really non-work!), corresponded with colleagues at other Universities about research and writing projects, dealt with a bunch of student queries on assorted topics, read some student work. Of course some bits of the job are more fun than others, but the variety is part of the attraction. Along with the flexibiity: I’ve managed to fit a full workload around also doing me weekly shop, a coffee morning out in the country, getting the van serviced. Even if I often work on-and-off from 7am till 11pm, it’s really nice not to have to work 9-5. Well, I see another appeals case has come in, so I’m going to take a look at that…

And tomorrow we have a tutorial to discuss these reflective diaries.

Stealing from Austin Kleon (Geography Blackout)

The American writer Austin Kleon, who wrote “Newspaper Blackout”, has also written a book called “Steal Like an Artist”, so I am hoping that he won’t mind that I have stolen his idea to help teach my Geography students. The picture here from Kleon’s website www.austinkleon.com illustrates what he does.

As Kleon puts it: “Grab a newspaper. Grab a marker. Find an article. Cross out words, leaving behind the ones you like. Pretty soon you’ll have a poem.”

So how do I use this teaching Geography? The point I’m trying to make with the students is that Science is a way of exploring and understanding the world, but that there are other ways of exploring and understanding the world, and that sometimes those different approaches can help each other out. For example, as a Geographer you might often want to look closely at the world around you to see details that will help you to describe, understand and represent the way the world works. Science is one way of doing that. But I learned from my friend and colleague the artist Miriam Burke that a good way of forcing yourself to look carefully at something is to try to make art about it. Trying to make a picture or a model or a poem of something really makes you look closely at it. Art is a great way of exploring. That’s why, for me, art and Geography go nicely side by side.

So I took a copy of the first page of one of the basic course textbooks (“Geography – a Very Short Introduction” by J.A.Matthews and D.T.Herbert, 2008) and I started crossing out words. I asked the students to do the same. Now I’m sure there’s a whole psycho-pedagogic discourse on the traumatic consequences of making students cross out swathes of their text book. We’ll save that for a different blog. The point I want to record here is about how asking students to cross out most of the words in a page from the textbook makes them look much more closely at the original source than if we just asked them to read it. And if we insist that their Blackout Poem reflects the underlying meaning or core concept of the page they are editing (but that it must do more than simply abbreviate the content of the page), the activity seems to engage a whole new level of critical attention to the source (helping students to learn and think about the material) and at the same time switches on a creative or interpretive intellect that fixes the academic content of the original document into the mental context of the student’s own “work” on the piece. In other words, by USING the original document to create something new of their own, they get much more out of it.

This illustrates something I constantly tell students: that the best way to learn something is to use it for some purpose, especially if that involves communicating it to somebody. If you are struggling to understand glacier dynamics, set a date where you have to teach glacier dynamics to somebody who knows nothing about it.  It also illustrates nicely how doing something that appears to be non-academic can be a big help with your academic work. The value of play. If I can get my students to PLAY with their scientific source material… well, they’ll end up just like me!

I only came up with (sorry, stole) this idea a couple of days ago, but already I see huge scope ranging from fun little tutorial activities to major coursework projects. You could even do it just for Art. Oh, yeah, Austin Kleon already thought of that.  When I tweeted my first attempt at a Geography Blackout yesterday it quickly became far and away my most retweeted tweet ever, so this seems to have struck a chord with others, too.  And that’s why I thought I’d say just a little bit more about it here. For the record, here is that first attempt. My “Geography Blackout” redaction of the opening page of Matthews and Herbert (2008). I suspect there may be more to follow.

Gosh, I hope nobody steals this idea.

Peter Knight's "Exploration", inspired by Austin Kleon's "Newspaper Blackout" and by page 1 of "Geography - A Very Short Introduction" (Matthews and Herbert, 2008).

Glacial Geomorphology 101

This week I am putting together a new introductory lecture on Glacial Geomorphology for my re-organised Glaciers module. What might one say right at the start of a series of lectures on glacial geomorphology? I thought I might say something like this:

For many of us one big reason for getting interested in Physical Geography has been an interest in the physical environment around us. Our most immediate and direct contact with the rest of the universe is through the small part of it that we can see and touch and walk around.  We can experience and witness the wonders of the universe, at least in a small way, through the wonders of our own planet.

The world is an amazing place, and many of us became geographers because we wanted to experience, know about, and work in the world’s great landscapes: mountains, deserts, volcanoes, glaciers… There are many elements to a landscape, from the underlying rocks to the plants that grow on them and the structures that people build, but if we strip away everything that is superficial the underlying framework of a landscape is its topography, its shape, its morphology. That is one reason why many people put geomorphology at the heart of Physical Geography.

One of the reasons that some of us have been drawn especially to the geomorphology of harsh wilderness environments such as deserts, high mountains and glacial areas is that in these environments the superficial elements are swept away. Vegetation is limited. Human structures are few. The basics of the landscape, its bones, are clearly exposed. The underlying framework becomes prominent in these environments.

Glacial landscape in West Greenland

The most valuable experience in my professional life has been to spend extended periods of time in these remote places. It has been worthwhile not only for their intrinsic interest but also because having seen landscapes with the superficial elements removed now allows me to recognise the same basic structural elements when I see them in other environments where they are largely obscured by superficial clutter. It’s easy to be amazed and say “wow” at a huge meltwater channel cutting through the frozen tundra, but very difficult even to recognise that spectacular channel when it is covered in woodland and urban development where it cuts through Stoke-on-Trent.

So the first great joy of glacial geomorphology is the opportunity to see geomorphology with a special clarity in modern glacial environments where processes and landforms are very prominent in the landscape. The second great joy of glacial geomorphology is being able to transfer the clarity of vision gained in  modern glacial environments to the study of ancient glacial environments such as those in the UK where the evidence is often less prominent.

Another year, another symphony.

I often say that one of the great things about my job is the way I get a new bunch of students each year and a new opportunity to try out different ways of exploring Geography with them. Sometimes I find an approach that seems to work well and I use it year after year, tweaking it a little each year as I learn from the experiences of each group of students that try it out. And so it has come round to October again and here I am trying new versions of a couple of my old favourites: the “through the window” exercise and the “If Geography were music…” exercise.

Part of the reason that it’s so handy getting a new bunch of students each year is that it enables me to do the exercises again myself. People talk about “lifelong learning” a lot nowadays, and I encourage students to carry on doing these sorts of exercises after they finish the course, but I must be an extreme example, doing these Geography-stretching exercises for myself again and again year after year and finding that they turn out a little differently each time. I have been reading Peter Franklin’s (1997) description of Theodor Adorno’s work on Mahler, in which he writes that “Adorno’s dialectical method relied on what he called a “constellation” technique, where ideas and images spiral around their subject matter, creating almost three-dimensional intellectual structures that are best grasped as totalities. Readers impatient for signposts and clearly stated goals may understandably find his writing cryptic…”  Increasingly I find that my private approach to Geography, out of sight of the easily-frightened 1st-year students,  is a little like that: things build up year after year into an increasingly multi-layered three-dimensional cloud or constellation of ideas, and I start to understand what I must have meant many years ago when I wrote “reality is a bundle, not a list”. And so the repeated playing of these same exercises with different students and different versions of myself creates a thick impasto palimpsest in which I can take different paths each year and look across at earlier versions of myself taking sometimes a path now less well travelled! In fact (and you will see now why I referred to the Franklin / Adorno / Mahler reading) my early steps along this year’s path into the “If Geography were music” exercise are diverging very little from those of last year. Perhaps my constellation of ideas is starting to succumb to its own gravity. Last year I used Mahler’s 2nd Symphony as my example of a piece of music that could serve as a theme tune for Physical Geography, and I gave the students a YouTube clip of Bernstein conducting Mahler 2 to help explain where I was coming from. Last night I was looking back on an online discussion that I had with the students last year, and reading one of my posts again it makes so much sense to me that I think I’ll say it again, here!

The question we are discussing is: If Physical Geography were music, what music would it be? Here’s what I wrote last year: “You’ve demonstrated that you do indeed have some interesting things to say, and a couple of you have strung together some good threads. Most of you have focused on music that has characteristics (particularly in structure) that remind you of the characteristics of Phys Geog. That’s great, but you haven’t given me many alternative ways of looking at the question. One very simple alternative approach would be to focus on music that has a geographical topic to it or has been specifically inspired by a geographical feature or landscape. For example I like this little song “Geodes” from “The Geography of Light”, or you might like Elgar’s Worcestershire compositions. Always try to see a question from several different points of view. A couple of you have asked me about my own answer to this topic. Well, I agree with most of the ideas you’ve all put forward and I don’t want to offer anything too concrete to limit the discussion, but I do lean towards the classical symphony in this context. As I said in my show-and-tell, landscape is like a symphony and a symphony is like the world. Here are some reminders about that. If you want my “choose just one” offering for this year it’s the following (YouTubeClip) (it takes a few seconds to warm up so give it a chance). In the video, watch the conductor’s face: that’s the “physical geography” face – the face of somebody who really sees and really feels the world. See him at about 2.50mins. This is the closing of Mahler’s 2nd Symphony. It’s a massive symphony, about 2 hours long, finally reaching this point with a huge orchestra and a massive choir. Try to hear all the instruments that are going into this: there are even cow bells in there. (In another symphony Mahler calls for a sledge hammer in the percussion section!) A symphony should be the world, and the conductor here has it running through him. Watch this. Turn up the volume. For me, this is the music that Physical Geography would be (this year, at least). “

Well, it’s early in the exercise so far this year, as I give the students a few weeks to think about it, so we’ll see what the students can teach me and what new ideas (and music) they can introduce me to, but for now I’m still with Mahler 2, this year as last. Another year, another symphony, but it’s Mahler 2 again!

PS – If you want to join in with the discussion there’s a Twitter competition for suggestions @KeelePhysGeog.

PPS – Reference: Franklin, P. (1977) “‘His fractures are the script of truth.’ – Adorno’s Mahler.” in Hefling, S.E. (ed) Mahler Studies (Cambridge).

Geography may soon cease to exist

Despite the best efforts of curriculum builders in schools and universities Geography may soon cease to exist. Like a firework, some disciplines burst into existence, burn brightly, explode into a thousand tiny sparkles and then disappear. This may be no bad thing: there is a school of thought that knowledge should not be broken up into disciplines and that it is only natural for a discipline to have a lifespan of usefulness and then die off. Following up the research I was doing recently into the Oceanic Turn of the 18th Century I was drawn into looking at work on “predisciplinarity”, or how ideas were organised before there were actual academic disciplines. From there I got into the idea that there might be such a thing as postdisciplinarity: a stage when disciplines stop being useful and cease to exist.  Geography as a named and labelled academic discipline isn’t actually that old, although people have been doing things that we would now call Geography more or less forever. The way that Geography can interact with so many other disciplines makes it a strong candidate for breaking up into little fragments, and I even have some colleagues who treat it as nothing but a bunch of fragments now. Of course they are wrong. There is a core, a heart to Geography that makes it much more than the sum of its component parts. Even though Geography overlaps with, and uses information from, a wide range of other disciplines, you can’t take a Historian, a Meteorologist, a Sociologist and a Geologist, shove them together in a building and call them a Geography Department! The heart, the Geography, the Geographers would be missing.  It is important for Geography students to learn (and for Geography staff to remember) what that heart is. Geography may be heading in the direction of the postdisciplinary, but it would be a little premature to think it was already there. Certainly Geography is the sort of discipline that can turn down that path very easily, but I don’t think it is time yet. Geography still needs some actual Geographers. If you are teaching Geography, or if you claim to be a Geographer, just make sure you know what Geography is and that you can tell the difference between what it reaches out to and what is at its core.

The Glacial Turn

My colleagues on the social / cultural side of Geography frequently use the word “turn” to describe changes in attitude or emphasis within the discipline. They talk about the “cultural turn” or the “feminist turn” or the “mobility turn” to refer to points in the history of the subject where attention turned towards those themes or issues. I take their use of “turn” to be similar to what I have always referred to in science as a “paradigm shift”: a change in the basic outlook of a discipline based on a fundamental shift in core knowledge or philosophy. That term comes from the work of the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who wrote a book called “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” in 1962 in which he differentiated between periods of “normal science” when most people are working within a particular paradigm, and periods of revolution or “paradigm shifts” when either gradual progress or a new development within a subject makes traditional approaches untenable and causes people to start working under a new set of assumptions. The history of science is full of these points.

I am currently doing research for a new book that I am writing about glaciers, and just now I’m in a section focusing on the history of the science of glaciers. My book is aimed at a wide audience, but I also want it to be relevant academically within the discipline of Geography, since that discipline has been at the centre of all my professional writing. The early history of glacier science provides an outstanding example of a paradigm shift, and I have been exploring the idea that this particular paradigm shift could be referred to as a “glacial turn” that affected broad areas of science and of wider culture in the middle of the 19th century. I am thinking that it might be interesting to include some discussion of that notion in my book.

In the early part of the nineteenth century it was not widely recognised that glaciers had ever been much more extensive than they are now. It was widely believed that Noah’s flood from the Bible was the last major event to affect our landscape. People did not imagine there had ever been an “ice age”. Then around 1840 a man called Louis Agassiz brought together ideas from a small number of earlier observers and unleashed upon the geological world the astonishing idea that huge areas of the planet had at one time been buried beneath enormous ice sheets, and that the landscapes that we see around us now in places like the UK and North America were created by ice in that glacial age. The “Glacial Theory” was a huge idea, and gave a completely new perspective to our view of how the world works and how landscapes are created. Looking back at that period now, one remarkable thing is how quickly and how deeply this new idea penetrated not only geology but science, and popular culture, more generally. The sudden realisation that glaciers came and went over the face of the planet through time and that the landscapes of the “civilised world” had been created by glaciers of which the scars were still clearly visible, changed our view of many things. When Charles Darwin published his ideas about evolution (another paradigm shift!)  in “The Origin of Species” in 1859, he cited Agassiz’s recent work and used the idea of the “Glacial Period”, and the climate change that it implied, in his own argument.

Our understanding of the physical world changed abruptly at that point when Louis Agassiz demonstrated that glaciers had once been much bigger and had changed the landscape in an enormous, ancient ice age.  Our perspective on our own position in the world also changed. Our recognition of the very fact of glaciers and ice ages, what I refer to as our “noticing” of glaciers, has a massive impact on our view of the world both in a physical, practical sense and in an almost metaphysical sense of grounding our perception of our place in the world. It gives us a new context. A world with glaciers in it gives us a particular way of recognising both scale and fragility in the environment, and that recognition is reflected strongly in our image of ourselves within that environment.  On the one hand glaciers and ice sheets make us feel very small. On the other hand, our impact upon them shows us to be very big in our ability to affect the planet. This evolving view has been reflected in the increasing sophistication of the way glaciers have featured in art and, recently, in international environmental politics. We live, therefore, not only in a physical ice age (an age when there are glaciers present on earth) but also, and only for the last century or so, in a cultural ice age, in other words a period when humanity notices, recognises, and ascribes physical and cultural importance to glaciers. We live in an age where glaciers affect our view of the world, and of ourselves.

Whether from a purely scientific perspective, or from a perspective that includes cultural, psychological or even metaphysical points of view, the paradigm shift represented by Agassiz’s promotion of the Glacial Theory from about 1840 can therefore be considered as what some of my colleagues would call a “turn”. I have recently been reading work by Adriana Craciun that refers to the “Oceanic Turn” in the 18th century. I think in my book I may find myself referring to the “Glacial Turn” of the 19th Century.

Micro-Geography: the 53rd parallel

I’ve been doing some very local geography lately. Partly just because I find my interests going that way and partly because I’m doing “research” for my “Total Geography” project. Of course doing hyper local micro-geography is nothing new, but it’s new to me. Today I was out with my i-phone, close to the building where I work, looking for the 53rd parallel. Yes, I know I could have looked it up on a map but that’s not the point. Yes I know that “real” geographers will tell me it’s sacrilege to use a phone for serious navigation, but this wasn’t all that serious. Part of the fun, in fact the whole point, was that this would be my 53-degrees north. I didn’t want to tame it and bag it and pin it down, I just wanted to go and find it, watch it for a bit, and then leave it alone. I know it’s already marked on the map so it’s not much of a discovery, but the one on the map isn’t mine, it’s the Ordnance Survey’s. I needed to find my own. Yes, the GPS found it for me really, but by combining the GPS and the map, and using a fairly dodgy GPS and a fairly small-scale map I kept any real certainty out of the picture and felt as if I was exploring for myself and discovering, over the space of a few minutes, an actual in-the-flesh example of an elusive geographical concept. A whole-number line stretching off around the world in both directions, separating everything to the north from everything to the south.  And so I sat for a while with my own little bit of the 53rd parallel. If I go and look for it in the same place tomorrow I hope it will have moved at least a little.  For a moment I considered (since it runs through the University Campus where I teach)  that I could mark it with some posts and a line carved in the ground, like the meridian at Greenwich or the equator at, well, at lots of places in fact. But then what would be the point of anyone trying to find it. Part of the fun of geography is exploration. At a global scale that is quite hard. But at a local scale it isn’t hard at all unless somebody has already labelled everything in big letters. Hence the growth in popularity of activities like geocaching, and the relevance of projects such as Mission Explore. For most of my professional life my Geography has either been at a grand scale (ice sheets, and epic landforms created in extreme environments) or has been couched within a framework of global systems. In a lot of “science” physical geography you can only get funding if you demonstrate that your project will address some global concern or relate to a massive international project concerning the history of the planet and the global impact of some hugely significant process . I don’t think I’ll get NERC funding to go and sit with the 53rd parallel for half an hour. But it’s Geography. And I enjoyed it a lot. If you have a little time to spare one afternoon you could do a lot worse than look at a map to find out what your nearest nice-sounding line of latitude or longitude is, then just go out and try to find it. Don’t disturb it. Just sit with it quietly for a while then leave it alone where nobody will pay it much attention. But next time you pass, you’ll know it’s around there somewhere. My 53-degrees North was on a stone bench at the end of the terrace walk overlooking the old walled garden at Keele. When I last saw it the line stretched off into the distance to the west across open country, and to the east it dived into dark woodland. Next week I might go and see if I can find 52-degrees and 59-minutes north.

Total Geography (2) – three starting points

When I explain my approach to Geography I keep finding myself returning to a small set of quotations and examples that illustrate where I am coming from.

T.S.Eliot wrote:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

from “Little Gidding”

I often say that this is the whole point of studying Geography. We explore, we learn about places, we discover new things about the world, we have experiences. And then we apply all of that experience to our own viewpoint, to what we see out of our own window. And by seeing our own place in the light of all these other things that we have discovered and explored, we can see it clearly, and know it properly, for the first time. How we understand the places with which we are familiar changes as we explore new places with which we can compare them.

But what does that exploration and discovery involve?

Marcel Proust wrote:

The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes; in seeing the universe through the eyes of another, one hundred others – in seeing the hundred universes that each of them sees.

from “In Search of Lost Time”

The aim of Geography is to see more, and one way to see more is to see through different people’s eyes, to take on board their experiences, their attitudes, their viewpoints. Our aim as Geographers is to be able to see in the landscape the things that a variety of other different types of people see, and to absorb their perspectives into our own. Then, recalling Eliot, we can come back from all that exploring and better know our own place, and ourselves.

Rudyard Kipling wrote:

…what should they know of England who only England know?

from “The English Flag”

If we know only one thing, have only one opinion, see from only one point of view, how can we judge that? In class with my students I use a simple analogy to explain this point. I hold up my whiteboard marker pen: “Look at this fat pen. But how do I know to call it a fat pen if this is the only pen I’ve seen?” I take a regular biro from my pocket. “Ah, yes, that one was a fat pen.” Only when I have something to compare with can I make my evaluation. If I know only one thing, I can know nothing about it. What can I know of this pen, if this pen is the only pen I know?

So we can’t judge something without context; without comparison. We can’t evaluate our own view of the world without placing it in the context of other views. I can’t really know my own “place” until, with Eliot, I have explored others and returned. And, with Proust, my journey of discovery is an exploration not only of places, but of other points of view.

As a Geographer, then, as I set out to explore and discover (or, as we say nowadays, to “engage with”) the world around me, what is it exactly that I need to do? How do I do Total Geography? I’ll consider that in future “Total Geography” posts.

Total Geography (1)

Over the last few months I have been putting together some ideas about something that I have been calling, in my own mind, “Total Geography”.  It is an approach to Geography that I have been working on for a long time and I think it’s about time for it to start showing its face in public a little, if only informally,  before I throw it into the deep end of formal publication in a little while.

More than probably any other subject Geography is characterised, in fact nowadays it is actually defined, by its split personality. One of the first ideas with which 1st-year geography undergraduates have to grapple is the notion of Geography as a “plural and contested discipline”. Some students don’t even engage with “Geography” at all but slip at the start of their degrees into either a “Physical Geography” or a “Human Geography” route. These specialisms, and the sub-specialisms within them, are very important. I have spent decades describing myself as a Physical Geographer, a geomorphologist and a glaciologist. But for me it is beginning to seem, after nearly 40 years of consciously defining myself as a Geographer of one sort or another, that I am losing something important if I look at the world through a small fragment of the lens, rather than using the whole of the glass.  One of the strengths of the discipline is that it can take a wide view of the big picture, as well as focusing down on the little details when they become important. Increasingly I feel that it is the contextualising wide view that defines the spirit of Geography.

And so, over the last few years, I have started to look for ways of rediscovering this wide view. Geography is about engaging with the world around me; exploring details to understand aspects of the whole. But my training has led me slowly into deep lines of specialist exploration: trained me to drill into my view of the world like a microscope. I know an awful lot about a few grains of sand and a few ice crystals. There’s more to Geography than that. We need to remember to keep looking up and looking around. Essentially, what I have therefore been playing with, both in my own geographical practice (let’s not call it research) and in the work I have been doing with students (and let’s not call that teaching), is a way of seeing more when I look at the world. A way of taking a wider point of view as well as appreciating those important details.

“Total Geography” sounds a little grand, but it has stuck in my head so it is the term I will continue to use. I’ll elaborate upon it in future posts tagged with that label, and I will try to collate the posts on my website at http://www.petergknight.com/totalgeography

“Glacier”: start here.

I started a major new project this week: a new book called “Glacier” that has been commissioned by Reaktion Books. “Started” might not be quite the right word, as I put together the proposal last summer and signed the contracts over six months ago, but I like to start every big project with a period of doing nothing: just letting the task sit quietly at the back of my mind for a while. Settling in.

Looking at the proposal yesterday after a six-month cooling-off period it had become sufficiently distant and unfamiliar that I could see it as a new reader would see it. It was interesting how, after six months, new ideas and new connections jumped up at me crying out to be included in the plan. That’s what happens in the six months of doing nothing: everything that you do on other work gets subconsciously filtered, analysed and stored up ready to be released when the project is reawakened.

Some of the new ideas come from new things that I have discovered and explored in the intervening time. For example the proposal includes a short list of different ways of looking at glaciers: as part of a physical system; as an inspiration for artists and scientists; as a victim of human environmental impact; etc. Looking at that list today it seems obvious to me that I should have put it in the context of the “Beholding Eye” work of geographer D.W.Meinig, because over the last six months I have been learning about Meinig’s work, and each new thing we learn shuffles itself into a position in our grand view of everything. “Ah!” I say, “that needs to go in the book”. (If you don’t know who I’m talking about, I have an entry about Meinig and “The Beholding Eye” here in my “Deep Geography” pages).

Other links and connections come not from things I’ve discovered, but from ideas I’ve been developing in parallel projects. I’m not sure if it shows clear-minded focus or narrow-minded shallowness on my part that as I brushed the dust off the Glacier proposal I realised that it fitted nicely into the framework of a “new” project that I’ve been starting to work on over the last couple of months. I had actually forgotten completely that I had included a whole chapter in the Glacier proposal called “Beyond Physical Geography”, which expands upon the idea that Physical Geography connects us to something beyond ourselves: “a way of seeing more, beyond the obvious, through the boundary between vision and imagination”. Although I had forgotten that section, and was mightily impressed yesterday with what I’d written about glaciers and unicorns (yes, really… you’ll need to read the book!), it illustrated again how leaving the project to rest for half a year allows ideas to come together. For the last few months I’ve been working on an idea that I call “Total Geography” about which  I’ll say more in a following post. I realised for the first time yesterday that my Total Geography project and my Beyond Physical Geography chapter were aspects of the same big idea.

And so clearly the time for doing nothing has run its natural course. Ideas have started to converge. I’ve cleared the decks of all distraction (for the first time ever, I think, I don’t have a single e-mail awaiting attention in my inbox right now).  It’s time to begin. Ironic, then, that instead of getting started I’m writing a blog post about getting started, and I have an appointment this week to meet with my co-author on another project to sign another book contract. Appropriately, that book is to be called “Big Ideas in Physical Geography”, and the meeting is to sign the contract, eat cake, and celebrate the start of doing nothing for a year on “Big Ideas” while I get started on “Glacier”. Here we go!